Vertical Integration in P&C Insurance - an interview with Sean Harper, CEO and Cofounder of Kin Insurance

As part of the Planck Insurance Thought Leadership Series I “met” Sean Harper at the Insurtech Connect (ITC) digital event in October 2020. Sean is an intriguing guy – CEO and Cofounder of Kin Insurance, a digital insurer focusing on homeowners’ insurance in some of the largest and most difficult states including Florida and California.

Our conversation was inspiring, focusing on the customer with an insurance distribution/value chain state of mind. 

The full interview can be found here, following please find some highlights.

Sean’s total focus on meeting homeowners’ coverage needs in the most simple and straightforward way led him and cofounder Lucas Ward to found Kin in 2016 as a “full-stack” insurer.

After Sean sold his payments processing business, he was looking for a financial product in a large and homogeneous market that was overly-intermediated and had new data sources available for pricing and underwriting. 

Homeowners insurance with a $105 billion market and growing expense ratios, with 93% of homeowners insurance sold through retail agents, and lots of data about buildings that didn’t exist before, was right on target. 

To address this opportunity Sean and Lucas founded Kin insurance - focused on providing “vertically integrated” insurance for the homeowners’ market, with a direct customer relationship from quote to purchase, servicing and claims.

Sean believes that in non-insurance financial services there is a trend of decoupling the origination and servicing (basically the customer interface) from the capital source. That way, risk appetites can change and risk can be traded without disrupting the customer. He sees this trend now starting in insurance as balance-sheet-light carriers like Kin continue to grow and the reinsurance markets become increasingly analytical.  

Sean’s parting words to share were to embrace the hard problems, solving them gives you more competitive advantages than if you only incrementally improved an established process.

I highly recommend reading the full interview here.